A HISTORY OF THE ILLEGAL WORLD OF PSYCHEDELIC LSD ART

A new exhibition from American artist Mark McCloud has a brand new exhibition ‘Take It Acid Is’ which just opened at Fifty24SF Gallery in San Francisco. It’s features over 50 years worth of LSD blotter artworks, some created by McCloud himself others which he’s collected from as far back as 1966.

LSD blotters or tabs are individual squares taken from larger paper grids. Like a strip of stamps essentially. Each grid is soaked in Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) – a drug noted for its psychedelic and hallucinatory effects.

During its heyday, LSD was considered a drug that could potentially expand your creative mind and unleash your imagination. The idea of creating artwork as a way of marketing the drug was nothing short of ingenious – creative packaging for the creative individual as it were.

Take a look at a few of the designs and illustrations, which are all part of the ‘The Institute of Illegal Images’ the largest collection of LSD blotter art in the world.